Continuing Success

 by

Tim Homan

        The North Carolina Wildlife Commission has restored a fast and wild ferocity-a taut arrow, feather fletched and set free on the wind-to the state's Southern Appalachian skies.  The commission accomplished this feat by bringing back the perfect aerodynamic form of the fastest being on Earth, the Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus).  With a moderate amount of luck, you can claim witness to the striking sight of this raptor on the wing, to the fluid grace of its spear-fast flight.  With even more luck and more time spent atop mountains open to the high blue, you might witness this falcon turn warlord if another large bird-Common Raven, Turkey Vulture, or Red-tailed Hawk-ventures into peregrine airspace while the proprietor is on high-altitude patrol.  Then this predator may tuck its dagger-tipped wings into one of the Earth's most exquisite expressions of form and function as it dives toward the intruder.
 

FINE Things July 22-29

FINE = Fun, Interesting, Novel, Exciting

or

FINED =
Fun, Interesting, Novel, Exciting, Depressing

Emily suggests this piece about the age of ancient diseases.

This NY Times piece tells you everything you might need to know about dealing with yellow jackets and their relatives.

Genes tell us where slaves came from and now, what happened to them after their arrival.

Before industrialization our climate wasn't unchanging. Many forces interacting together determine our climate. Here is an article that will help you understand how they work and interact.

Eugenia recommends this article about how farming practices can be changed to protect pollinators.

Emily recommends: A recently published study shows that US crops are already seeing a decline in production due to pollinator decreases. The Guardian has the story.

Another paper shows a decline in bee-plant pollinator interactions over the last 125 years.

FINE Things July 17-24

Fun, Interesting, Novel, Exciting Things

Invasive earthworms are in the northeast and they are here in Georgia too! Emily and I found a strange worm on our daily walk yesterday. It looked and moved like a small snake. I think it was a Crazy Worm, Amynthas agrestis. See the link above for a photo. Here is a video of one of these worms. Notice the snake-like movement as it attempts to escape.
 
Do you like podcasts? And plants? Then you will enjoy this source of podcasts about things botanical. Scroll through the various offerings and you'll be sure to find something that piques your curiosity. In Defense of Plants Podcasts

Here's another compilation of podcasts from the Royal Botanical Garden in Australia.

How can migratory birds can find their destination? Scientists think they can sense the earth's magnetic field. But how? Find out here.

Want to know how viruses evolve?

I know a lot of Ramblers are bird watchers and many can identify birds by their vocalizations. But the "Old Sam Peabody-Peabody-Peabody" call of the White-throated sparrows may soon be a thing of the past.

Coming up next month: a Webinar on Snakes of Georgia, August 14, 2020; Noon to 1 PM; to register email: uge3039@uga.edu

What If?

by Tim Homan

June 8, 2014, our first day camping in California's Kings Canyon National Park. (1)  After supper sitting right beside the South Fork Kings River, its shallow water clear as dew on a window sill and flowing fast, Page and I walked the Zumwalt Meadow Trail.  A short, 1.5-mile-lollipop loop, Zumwalt Meadow is a nature trail, an interpretive trail with informative pamphlet that corresponds to numbered posts.
        We crossed the bridge over the South Fork and began the flattened loop portion of the route around but not in the green and grassy meadow.  Along the rock-bound southern side of the loop, the pamphlet taught me that what I had been calling talus for years was actually scree. (2)  The north side of the loop closely paralleled the edge of the opening through young conifers, trees that had reclaimed part of the meadow in the absence of fire.  The evergreens and a few clouds to the west darkened the trail corridor just enough for female mosquitos to begin their crepuscular blood patrol.  We walked past a double brace of black-tailed deer (3), all does, two about 10 yards out in the clearing, the other two a few feet inside the forest.

FINE Things July 9-16

FINE stands for Fabulous, Interesting, Novel & Exciting.

 

A female Velvet Ant; males have wings.
(photo by Don Hunter)

This is the time of year to look for Velvet Ants – wasps that look like large, fuzzy, red and black ants. But in the Mojave Desert some Velvet Ants look like the seeds of creosote bush. Why?

How a beetle evolved to look (and smell) like an ant.
 
How predictable is evolution? An ant-loving beetle holds answers. (A longer article about rove beetles)

When danger threatens, use your head. 

Like the poker-playing dog that drew to an inside straight, sometimes you have to be amazed that it is done at all, even if done imperfectly. A Flying snake video. And an article about flying snakes.

Did you ever recite a little ditty as you watched a Ladybug fly from your hand? 
     "Ladybug, ladybug
      Fly away home
      Your house is on fire
      And your children will burn"
If you watched it fly away you might not have noticed where the wings appeared from. In case you didn't, here is the amazing secret.

Wonder and Fear Way Down Upon the Suwannee

by Tim Homan

     Upper Suwannee River*, early November, 2015.  Six of us—Bob, Brown, Gary, Linda, Page, and I—launch two canoes and two kayaks at the US 441 landing just south of Fargo, Georgia.  If the weather is good, you automatically feel lucky on the first day of a trip down a Deep South river.  You know that your maneuverable island of paddlecraft and packs glides between the boundaries of blackwater and blue sky and flanking green forest.  And better yet, you know that you are riding piggyback atop the flow of the Earth’s circulatory system—the hydrologic cycle, the round river—down the conveyor belt of a stationary streambed, your speed the sum of your will and gravity’s invisible grip.

A Newfound Wildness

 By Tim Homan

        Mid-June, 2008, first few days of our 120-mile canoe trip down the Green River in Southern Utah.  Page and I had launched at Green River State Park and would be picked up at Spanish Bottom, a short distance downstream from the Green's confluence with the Colorado, and easy walking distance to the first standing-wave water sculptures: powerful movement flowing through stationary form, wild-river waves that neither roll nor break.  The first half of our trip would wind through the deeply entrenched meanders of the mostly BLM (Bureau of Land Management)-owned Labyrinth Canyon, part of our nation's public commons.  The second half would run below hundreds of photogenic hoodoos and towering red cliffs of Wingate Sandstone, sheer and smooth and cowboy-western scenic, in Canyonlands National Park's Stillwater Canyon.
        Due to conflicts with our work schedules, we paddled at the wrong time of the year.  The latte-colored Green flowed high and freighted with silt from snow-melt mountains far to the north.  The fast-moving sediment ticked audibly against our paddles with every stroke.  The cloudless days were hot as a firecracker in hell, especially in the side canyons, and the mosquitos were troublesome near the bottoms, where the river had risen into the lower ends of the side-canyon washes, creating warm, slack-water conditions just right for a wriggler-larvae factory.  But the Green's cold current offered instant relief from both mosquitos and sweltering sun.
       Each day Labyrinth Canyon grew higher, more complex, and more richly colored.  Each day the sightlines to the rock rims rose to a sharper angle while the wedge of visible sky narrowed.
       First three days the Green's curving brown ribbon sliced deeper and deeper into the primeval chaos that had metamorphosed-through the Earth's ancient alchemy of long heat and compaction-into today's color-coded geology, writ large and layered within Labyrinth's river-carved canyon.  Each day the river cuts deeper and deeper into that chasm of time known as the Jurassic Period, which lasted from approximately 200 million to 145 million years ago (plus or minus 2 million years).  And now all this ancient tumult and violence lies silent and still in the dinosaur-track cemetery to either side of your paddlecraft, the peaceful stasis of the scene a trick of perspective, an illusion compressed through the lens of a baseline not yet a week old.

       Late in the afternoon of day three, after our canoe passed a dozen kayaks hauled out on river-right, we noticed a small sandbar sheltering shallow still-water between the bar and a relatively low cutbank.  Finally, after 26 fast-flowing miles for the day, we had found an easy and safe landing leading to a memorable camp: a low-cliff alcove for sheltered cooking, a wide open and flat site on the rim of the first bench back from the river for the tent, and an easy scramble up boot-gripping rock to a high perch with a great view of the Green up and downstream.  We immediately agreed on a layover day, so we could slow our trip down and dayhike up Twomile Canyon, its mouth only a few hundred yards downstream on river-right, first thing in the morning.
        After supper, while we were sitting in the cooling breeze well above the pale brown river, a muscular and tattooed young man of medium height climbed the rock up to our sunset spot and began chatting us up.  He was from the kayak camp over 300 yards upstream, and he was a reluctant participant in one of those wilderness outreach programs for troubled teens: backcountry boot camp for juvenile offenders, hoods in the woods.  He had punched out his high school football coach during his senior season back home in Colorado.  Now he was supposed to be spending the night alone at least a mile from camp on "a solo, soul-searching, bullshit quest sort of thing."  But as we quickly discovered, his most immediate quest was to find out if we had a couple of cigarettes he could buy for a dollar.  We didn't.  Page had wine, and I had whiskey and some bare-bones cheap cigars, but we weren't about to let those three cats out of the bag.  He quickly moved on to meet up with a couple of guys from his group.
        Early the next morning, we climbed the jumbled-rock rise behind camp and quickly picked up a path leading toward the entrance of Twomile.  Less than 100 yards from our tent, we spotted the fresh and well-defined parallel lines of large and unfamiliar tracks also following the path toward the canyon.  We stopped and closely examined the footfalls deeply imprinted into the register of the path's soft soil.  The tracks were round and four-toed with no claw or toe-nail marks, a little over 3 inches in both length and width.  They were roughly the same in size and shape, showed long stride, wide straddle.
        Page asked what I thought.  I translated the wild script of last night's silent wandering; it was an easy call.  The large, round, and perfect footprints belonged to an apex predator with retractable claws: a cat, and only one candidate has feet large enough to fit.  Here, right at our toes, a mountain lion, a cougar, had recorded its passage upon the land.  The loose soil was no longer just loose soil; it was soft lion-tracked soil.  The path was no longer just a convenient way to Twomile Canyon; it was the route of a big and long-tailed feline, the first of its species we had ever seen, a lucky find.
       Page placed our compass beside a paw print for size perspective, then took a few photos.  I sketched several tracks in my small notebook.  We talked through a quick process of elimination just to make sure our excitement was warranted.  Black bears are rare or absent from the dry, rugged, and frequently rock-bound terrain just north of Canyonlands National Park.  Besides that, bears have five-toed feet conspicuously different front to back and would leave obvious claw marks in soft soil.  Nope, not a bear.
        No wolves roam southern Utah, and all canids including dogs and coyotes mark their travels with tracks showing toe nails poked into loose soil.  Bobcat tracks are even smaller than coyote tracks, which are the size of medium-sized dogs and far too small to match the signature heel pads and the oval-shaped toe pads at our feet.  This spoor marked the nearly effortless travel of a cat, a big-footed and long-bodied cat.  That narrowed the possibilities to one again.  We were definitely trailing the tracks of a mountain lion, the ambush predator with legendary leaping ability and short-range speed, mythical stealth, strength, and flowing grace closing in on the kill.  This same wild cat is so well adapted to its primary prey that the gap between its long-fang canines fits lock-and-key tight to either side of a deer's neck vertebrae.
        Up close from our knees, we noticed slight size and shape differences in the tracks which we attributed to slight anatomical differences between the cougar's front and back feet.  All of the tracks exhibited a slight concavity scalloped out in the front of the pad, and the two indentations in the heel dividing it into three shallow lobes.
        We followed the obligate carnivore's backtrack for close to 100 yards to where it had stepped down onto tattle-tale soil from higher and much rockier land upslope.  Page and I followed the footprints forward from where we had first noticed them.  The cougar sign continued straight ahead for another 120 to 130 yards before veering to the right and up toward Twomile Canyon at a higher trajectory than we wanted to take.  The lion's stride length remained evenly spaced throughout, a slow and unhurried pace, no distortion of the prints from hurry or sudden changes in direction.
       Before we left the lion path, I knelt down and traced the outlines of one of the large tracks with my forefinger.  A second-hand touching of its strength and stealth, its predatory prowess?  Pleistocene ancestors-who live full-blooded in our genome-wanting to know more about the animal, to touch its spirit?  I don't know.  I touched and traced without forethought.  But having slid my finger around all parts of the paw print, the simple act felt like it satisfied some unknown urge, some ancient curiosity still crouched close to the bone.
       The two of us entered the lowest end of the side canyon.  We didn't see anyone else or any more tracks larger than a rodent's except for a few pointy-hoofed mule deer tracks higher up Twomile.  We thought we might find some water and the lion's tracks again further up, but we found neither.
        The spare country of brown river and red rock had come alive.  The cougar tracks had given the landscape graceful ferocity to accompany the novelty of its layer-cake geology.  The seemingly empty country had filled up with a newfound wildness, become more formidable knowing a sleek and powerful predator had passed us by in the starry night and entered the canyon we were exploring.  The deep shadows now hid fangs and claws that could clamp and rip at the deadly end of a spring-loaded leap.  The lion made us more alert, made us search for more large round tracks, made us keep a sharp eye out for tawny movement up ahead.